I also think that it is not very probable, that just because there is a tool now and some forum people decide to agree on a R128 tagging format, that there will be only a fraction of RG's device and player support anytime soon. It was different, when David started, because it filled a gap at its time, for which there were no solutions.

Until RG evolves into something allowing versioning, it can take ages. It might even never happen, since ID3 is such a mess. (The world of tagging could be such a better place without mp3.)

=> For an user with complete control over his own music library, it could be an attractive hack to rescan his library and write R128 estimated, but RG compatible, tags to his music collection. He would then have the benefits of both worlds, probably better loudness estimation due to gating, and instant playback support for most available hardware. RG enabled players don't really care what RG means or how the values were calculated. They just apply gain and prevent clipping.

Jdoering's approach to just use ref_pink.wav to get a relative offset between both approaches is very reasonable.

PS An additional tag could indicate, that the values are R128 based. A user could then choose to rescan all tracks, which do not have that, yet.

=> For an user with complete control over his own music library, it could be an attractive hack to rescan his library and write R128 estimated, but RG compatible, tags to his music collection. He would then have the benefit of both worlds, probably better loudness estimation due to gating, and instant playback support for most available hardware. RG enabled players don't really care what RG means or how the values were calculated. They just apply gain and prevent clipping.

That's exactly what I've tried to say. With R128GAIN you can do this just out of the box.

QUOTE (googlebot @ Jan 12 2011, 13:58)

Jdoering's approach to just use ref_pink.wav to get a relative offset between both approaches is very reasonable.

=> For an user with complete control over his own music library, it could be an attractive hack to rescan his library and write R128 estimated, but RG compatible, tags to his music collection. He would then have the benefit of both worlds, probably better loudness estimation due to gating, and instant playback support for most available hardware. RG enabled players don't really care what RG means or how the values were calculated. They just apply gain and prevent clipping.

That's exactly what I've tried to say. With R128GAIN you can do this just out of the box.

I agree. Just use the RG fields. The only difference would be how the RG values were calculated. The key point here is the calibration of the R128-calculated RG data to match the RG-calculated RG data. Which means...

QUOTE

QUOTE (googlebot @ Jan 12 2011, 13:58)

Jdoering's approach to just use ref_pink.wav to get a relative offset between both approaches is very reasonable.

I agree.

I disagree here. I'd rather like to see what the authors of the loudness papers I mentioned call "zero-order correction". Meaning: Take a huge audio file database (not only one file), compute the average RG value using the "old" RG algorithm. Then do the same with R128gain, using the recommended reference level of -23 LUFS. Taking the difference between the RG-average gain and the R128-average gain gives you the offset by which RG and R128 differ. Based on that offset we could "correct" the R128 gain values when writing them as RG-style metadata to files. Doing it that way, we wouldn't really need the additional tag that googlebot mentioned, since on average the new R128-calculated RG values are in the exact same range as the "old" RG values.

I disagree here. I'd rather like to see what the authors of the loudness papers I mentioned call "zero-order correction". Meaning: Take a huge audio file database (not only one file), compute the average RG value using the "old" RG algorithm. Then do the same with R128gain, using the recommended reference level of -23 LUFS...

There is now a public link for this paper. Recommended reading. But if you can't manage to find the time, the answer can be found on page 11: RG=-18dB - LKFS